We no longer build to be remembered

Sitting in a café, I looked around and realised how numb we’ve become to ugliness. The modern Australian landscape — its shopping centres, new suburbs, and endless warehouses of consumerism — is a monument to apathy. We’ve built blandness into our identity, and we no longer even see it. It's a catalogue built on speed, profit, and total cultural amnesia.

It wasn’t always this way. A century ago, we built with conviction. Our post offices and town halls stood like declarations — that beauty mattered, that a building should speak of permanence and civic pride. Materials were chosen to endure; ornament was not waste, it was respect.

Now we build for spreadsheets, not for people. Drive through a retail park: identical warehouses broken only by the logos that occupy them. Step into the suburbs and you’ll see the same disease — quarter-acre dreams carved into sardine lots, two-storey boxes shoulder to shoulder, driveways replacing gardens, sunlight traded for square metre yield. This is not progress; it’s cultural decay wearing a mortgage.

In the city, the rot only climbs higher. Towers without soul, efficient but empty, monuments to speculation. They stand for nothing except their own height. No one will stop beneath them in a hundred years and feel awe — or even remember they existed.

And yet, if you walk through the inner suburbs — Fitzroy, Paddington, North Adelaide — beauty still survives in fragments. The Italianate terraces, the wrought-iron balconies, the sandstone facades and the red-brick Federation homes — proof that once we understood proportion, grace, and the moral duty to build well. Look at the lost Federal Coffee Palace or the Leviathan Building: exuberant, dignified, human. They were acts of faith — architecture as memory, built to outlast their makers.

That continuity has been broken. We’ve replaced craft with compliance. Permanence no longer fits our philosophy. In our hunger for convenience, we’ve built a disposable world — and it’s infected how we think, feel, and live.

A few voices still resist. Sean Godsell, Peter Stutchbury, John Wardle, Kerstin Thompson — architects who build with conscience, texture, and time in mind. They remind us what we’ve traded away, and what might still be possible if we rediscover patience and pride.

Architecture is the mirror of a civilisation’s soul. Ours reflects indifference — sterile, temporary, and cheap. We no longer build as if we expect to be remembered. The tragedy isn’t just that we’ve lost beauty — it’s that we’ve stopped believing beauty is necessary.